Caramel, 23, joined CatholicMatch because a friend kept badgering her to become a member. “She met her husband through CatholicMatch, and she was insistent that I should give it a try. She kept pestering me, so I finally told her that I'd give it one month if she'd leave me alone,” recalls Caramel, from NC.
Even though Caramel joined CatholicMatch, she had low expectations. She came to the process with a bias—she thought online dating was only for the desperate. She also wasn't expecting to meet anyone, and she was okay with that because as a recent college graduate, she was focusing on her job. Added to all of these doubts was the fact that she was not a United States resident at the time, so she was unsure if she would be staying or returning home to Caribbean island, St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Unexpectedly, in September of 2013, she received an emotigram from Nathan, 29, who was also from NC. Caramel was intrigued enough to extend her membership.
Nathan had joined CatholicMatch because he wasn't having much luck with the traditional dating scene, and he felt more comfortable meeting new people online. He said, “I wanted to draw from a pool of candidates I knew were Catholic because that's very important to me. I'm also better at presenting myself online than in person—cyberspace is my vacation home.”
He’d been on CatholicMatch on-and-off for three years when he saw Caramel’s profile. He reached out to her because in reading her profile, he found her to be intelligent, thoughtful, and mature. She had her priorities straight.
On October 10th, they decided to meet for dinner. “We did the classic dinner and a movie. It was nice. He was nice. He was easy to talk to, but I honestly wasn't really attracted to him on our first date,” she recalls.
Overcoming Fear of Commitment
However, Nathan was a nice guy, and she didn't really have a reason not to agree to a second date. After about three dates, Caramel was considering ending the relationship “It wasn’t because of anything he had done. I was scared because this was my first real relationship. I also didn't have a great opinion of men and marriage because my parents and grandparents were both divorced. Marriage seemed more trouble than it was worth. Thankfully, I told my roommate what I was planning. By talking to her, I realized that I actually really liked Nathan.”
Her roommate told her to give the relationship a second chance. Once Caramel got past her fears, she started to fall in love with Nathan. “Fast! Before I knew it, I was head over heels in love with him. We started seeing each other very frequently. It helped that we only lived 15 minutes apart,” she said.
They found that they enjoyed attending Mass together, going to the library, watching Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, cooking, and playing games. “We liked generally to be nerdy together. In fact, one of our early dates was at Books A Million,” she says.
Nathan adds, “We're both of similar temperament: shy, socially awkward types who'd rather spend an evening at home with a good book than go out.”
Family Problems
Caramel was experiencing family problems around the time she met Nathan; those problems were compounded when her family showed their disapproval of him. "I think it was probably that my family had trouble accepting that my life was now in the U.S. with Nathan and no longer in the Caribbean," she shares.
Nathan and Caramel had a spat with her mother and sister that didn't end very well during Christmas time. This unfortunate argument with her family ended up bringing Nathan and Caramel closer. Caramel said, “Nathan showed me that he was someone I could trust and depend on—something that was very new for me. It was amazing to have someone who would stick up for me, who would hold me and let me cry, who would make me smile, who wasn't going to leave me.”
She Didn’t Want a TV Show Proposal
One evening, while they were watching tv together Caramel commented on a proposal in the
show they were watching. “I mentioned that I hated the idea of being proposed to in public but that my ideal proposal would be on a beach at sunrise. I wasn't dropping hints, and I promptly forgot about it.”
But Nathan didn't forget; he was taking mental notes.
In the summer of 2014, they took a weekend trip to the beach in South Carolina. Early Sunday morning, they went to the beach to watch the sunrise. “At exactly sunrise (6:08 a.m.), Nathan pulled out a gorgeous ring and proposed,” Caramel remembers.
Nathan laughs, “It worked out pretty well because she had previously told me what her dream proposal was, and then promptly forgot that she told me.”
They were married on November 15, 2014. Caramel said, “We didn't have long to plan the wedding, and we were on a very tight budget, but it was beautiful. When I said my vows, it was like there was no one else in the world but Nathan at that moment. And I knew, as I said them, that they were going to be forever.”
It was Meant to Be
Caramel says she loves being married to Nathan. She never imagined that marriage would be so wonderful or that she could be so happy. She admits that it takes a lot of effort to have a good marriage, but that to her, the effort doesn’t seem like hard work. “The biggest challenge has been that my family still doesn't approve of Nathan or our marriage, but I'm hopeful that they will eventually come around. I've also gotten some 'interesting' comments since we are two different ethnicities and two different nationalities. But they really don't bother me much. I think our differences just make us special.”
They feel God’s hand in orchestrating their marriage. In all probabilities, they should have met in person rather than CatholicMatch. “We found out later that Nathan’s parents lived about 10 minutes away from where I was living at the time, and his grandmother lived in the same apartment complex as I did. Nathan would sometimes go to Mass at the same parish that I attended. We probably passed each other, or at least saw each other before, but had it not been for CatholicMatch, we might never have even met,” she says.
Parting Advice
Nathan advises, “Do it. It's worth the experience, and this website is far superior to most I've tried—and I have tried quite a few. People here actually respond, and are who they say they are. If you're serious about marriage, you won't regret your time here, even if you don't find someone."
